Saturday, March 4, 2017

The Buhari government is an absolute propagandocracy, that
is, a government conducted by intentionally false and manipulative information.
And this is so because the very foundation of the government is fraud.

When you defraud people into electing you and you have no
substance to justify the trust they invested in you, you either apologize and
be penitent (if you are honorable) or you perpetually churn out lie after lie
to cover up earlier lies since you have no truth to tell. That’s the profile of
this government in a nutshell.

Most members of the Buhari Media Center propagandists-in-residence are in this photo. They transitioned from APC presidential media campaigners to BMC propagandists. Can you identify anyone from this photo?

The fraud started when, shortly after being sworn in as
president, President Buhari went to Chatham House in London (where else?) to
repudiate the “One Hundred Things Buhari Will Do in 100 Days” and the “My
Covenant With Nigerians” campaign documents, two of the signature documents
that helped propel APC to an unlikely electoral triumph, and that caused many
of us hitherto nonpartisan commentators to identify with and support Buhari in
2015.

Buhari called the documents a “fraud.” He was right. But
what was an even bigger fraud was that he knew these documents to be fraudulent
but conveniently chose not to repudiate them during the campaigns. His
strategic silence caused people to elect him on the basis of fraud.

New York mayor Mario Cuomo once famously said that
politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. APC “changed” this: they campaigned
with fraud and now govern with unimaginative lies and mindless propaganda to
cover up the fraud that got them into power. It’s the biggest, most audacious con
game in Nigeria’s entire political history.

After renouncing the documents that got him elected,
everything went downhill from there. He renounced all the campaign promises he
made, including his promise to publicly and fully declare his assets and make
public declaration of assets a precondition for appointment into his
government. So APC basically became a party of fraud with no programs—just like
the PDP it upstaged.

In the absence of anything to show for its existence, since
fraud is its very foundation, the Buhari government has elevated sterile
propaganda, mindless mind-management, and thoughtless, unintelligent mendacity
to an art.

For starters, as I pointed out in my Facebook status update,
which went viral and shaped national discourse on the Buhari government, the
president has 9 media aides. Yes, 9, not 6 as previously thought!

All of these aides also have a retinue of other aides. For
instance, the president’s PA on Broadcast Media recently appointed a “Media
Assistant 1 on Social Media.” The numeral “1” indicates that there are other
personal aides to the president’s PA that we don’t know about yet. This
absurdity used to exist only in the realm of implausible humor.

But it gets worse: the president also has a clandestine hate
and propaganda factory called the Buhari Media Center (BMC), which has nearly
40 paid propagandists whose mandate is to smear, demonize, and troll government
critics with thousands of fake, foul social media handles. They also flood the
comment sections of news websites with false handles and calculatedly
duplicitous information, in addition to producing propagandistic social media memes
(often with southern Nigerian-sounding names) that appear to come from everyday
Buhari fans. The 40 odd propagandists-in-residence at the BMC are paid N250,000
per month.

Modeled after the Atiku Media Center (a reason its head calls
it the Buhari Media Center, although it goes by other names), it is located on
Okonjo-Iweala Drive (close to CBN quarters) in Jabi, Abuja.

When I first exposed this shadowy, sinister propaganda outfit
that operates outside the orbit of the formal structures of government, its
existence was denied. Now some character by the name of Muhammad Labbo who
describes himself as “Chairman/ Co-ordinator [sic]” of the “Buhari Media Support
Group” admitted to the existence of the propaganda center, but says it isn’t
called the Buhari Media Center, and that it is funded by a private individual.

But who is this private individual who is funding a
viciously malicious presidential propaganda outfit? What is his interest? Is
this a pay-to-play scam? Is it a payback for a favor from the Buhari
government? Or is it a favor in anticipation of a reward? Why should a shadowy
individual fund a pro-government, extralegal propaganda and mind-management
unit?

And what about the N100 million Lai Mohammed’s Ministry of
Information has allocated for “interaction with bloggers” in the 2017 budget?
Who are these bloggers government will be “interacting” with for N100 million
in a time of recession?

Most importantly, though, the minions that make up the
Buhari Media Center propagandists aren’t even the brightest bulbs in the box.
Most of them should sue their brains for non-support. First, they can’t string
together a sentence in English that isn’t a riotous travesty of the language.
Nor do they seem to have any basic familiarity with elementary logic. Their
stock-in-trade is unrestrained verbal primitivism, vulgar abuse, smears, innuendoes,
and outright libel.

They, for instance, have been on full attack mode against my
person since I exposed them. One Muhammad Labbo, who would do well to take
elementary lessons in grammar and logic, said I too belonged to a BMC-like unit
during Obasanjo’s administration. Lie. The unit I was recruited to be a part
of, about which I wrote several times in my column, was called the Presidential
Research and Communications Unit (later renamed Public Communications Unit) and
projected Nigeria to the international community. The unit’s website was
indicatively www.nigeriafirst.org,
and it never got involved in domestic media interventions.

Unlike the PRCU, BMC is Buhari first (and Nigeria last), as
the name of the group suggests. It operates outside the structures of
government and even claims to be funded by a sinister outsider to slander critics
of the president. Only a mind held hostage by illogic and defective intellect
will make a false equivalence between working for a unit of government that disseminated
information about Nigeria to a global audience and a baleful, extralegal
propaganda unit that defames and attacks an incompetent president’s critics
using fake handles.

As I pointed out in a 2015 article, Nigeria’s brand of
political public relations, for the most part, does no more than appeal to the
base, attract enemies, scare away potential converts, and ossify negative
opinions about the people that are putatively being defended. It consists in
barbarous, impulsive, sophomoric insults against real and imagined political
opponents—and cloying, hagiographic defense of principals. It lacks nuance, is
childish, and seems unconcerned with logic and persuasion.

The BMC is a full realization of this peculiar primitive
propaganda that defines Nigeria’s public communication. It gets worse when the government it defends is founded and subsists on fraud and lies.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.